Which of the ethics developments below will explode into genuinely significant historical and cultural developments? You never know. On this date in 1910, A violent explosion destroyed the Los Angeles Times building, killing 21 and injuring many more. The paper’s publisher Harrison Otis was a fanatic opponent of organized labor, then just beginning to get really organized, and when two union leaders, the McNamara bothers, were arrested as the likely bombers, the paper went into a major push to convince the public that they, and all unions, were evil. Organized labor responded by hiring the nation’s most famous defense lawyer, Clarence Darrow, to defend the two, certain that they had been framed and that a conviction for murder would destroy the labor movement. Darrow, as he described in his autobiography, “The Story of My Life,” quickly discovered that a) the brothers were guilty (though they were not trying to kill anyone) and b) that there was no way they could plead not guilty—what the two union organizations that hired him assumed he would have them do—that wouldn’t result in their executions.

Darrow decided that the only way to handle his conflicting duties to both sets of clients, the unions that were paying his record-setting fee because they were certain that an innocent verdict in the trial was essential to the survival of the labor movement, and the brothers whose lives were on the line, was to get a hung jury….and the only way he could get that was by bribing a couple of jurors.

Darrow ended up being caught red-handed and tried for jury tampering, only escaping prison by being presented by a great defense lawyer—himself. In order to make everyone forget his disgrace, Darrow set out to henceforth only take on high-profile cases that would have him fighting for human rights: every case we associate with Darrow today came after the LA Times bombing trial, which he had intended to be his last before retirement. Amazingly, he did make everyone forget that fiasco, an ethics lesson in which he made fateful call that the ends justify the means. Today, so no lawyer is ever placed in Darrow’s position again, the ethics rules in all jurisdictions hold that a third party paying a lawyer to defend another is not a client no matter how important the result of the trial may be.

1. Nancy Pelosi, ethics villain. More irony: it is astounding that the Democratic Party can get away, even a little bit, with screaming to the heavens that Republicans are a “threat to democracy” when they have allowed an openly unethical,villainous woman like Pelosi to lead their national legislators for so long. Even when her failing mental acuity leads her to reveal her vile character, as it did yesterday, there seem to be no consequences. “We have a shortage of workers in our country and you see even in Florida, some of the farmers and the growers saying why are you shipping these immigrants up north, we need them to pick the crops down here,” Pelosi said, discussing the need for “comprehensive immigration reform” without saying what that would be. She also stuttered a while before deciding wich misleading word to use for “illegal immigrants,” because her party and its allies have so many deceitful ones: “Migrants”? “Undocumented workers?” “Tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free”? She settled on “immigrants.” Her message–it would be nice if the news media explained it to our lazy, have awake public—was that farmers should be encouraged to pay illegal immigrants paltry wages to avoid paying enough to attract American workers. What an awful, awful human being—and she’s a revered leader of the Democratic Party.

Continue reading →